November! I know November is widely regarded as the asshole month of the year, but I actually like it quite a bit more than, say, March (important birthdays notwithstanding) because there is enough impending holiday stuff that I'm super excited for the month.

+ The restoration company has said we will probably be back home before Christmas, which I am trying not to think about too much because I have gotten my hopes up many many times in these 9 months, but I also told my mom that if that happens it's my favorite Christmas present, SORRY EVERYONE ELSE.

+ I'm knitting a sweater for my sister to Christmas, speaking of holidays, and it's going well.......for it being a fair isle sweater and I have only knitted in the base color so far! Ha...ha! It actually looks like a sweater instead of three weird piles now, which I'm counting as definite progress.

+ I am STILL trying to meet my Goodreads goal despite it getting all shirty with me about my having a meltdown this summer:

I CAN STILL MAKE IT!!!

+ Speaking of projects that are definitely great ideas, I'm rewatching Buffy from the beginning and if there was ever a moment for a Troy Barnes MY EMOTIONS!!! scene, this is it. I'm almost finished with season two, so I'm sure I'll have a 10,000 word essay on that when I finish. MY HEAAAART.

TV UPDATE: I really have no idea what I am going to be watching this year, other than sitcoms (New Girl, Brooklyn Nine Nine, Mindy Project if we ever catch up on it). I've been meaning to pick up Elementary for ages, but other than that….? I think this may be the year I catch up on all the imports I've been meaning to for ages.

HOUSING UPDATE: blaaaagh. We're in the process of picking everything out for the restoration, FINALLY, which is exciting but also exhausting. We're probably not going to be back before the end of the year. This mostly stresses me out and makes me sad, and I don't want to think about it anymore!

OTHER: Wedding season is finally over, everyone take a celebratory nap! The final damage was 6 weddings including 10 events attended in 3 states. May I never have a season like this every again, amen.

APPENDIX:1: I don't feel like this adequately captures just HOW MANY TIMES I reread QOA/KOA last month. It was a lot of times. A LOT.2: The War was a really incredible documentary. It's Ken Burns, so it's a miniseries that is like 14 hours total (there's a reason it is the majority of what I watched in September), but that time is not wasted AT ALL. It's a bottom up series of stories about the war, focusing on four towns in the US and how people in those towns experienced the war, but it gets into so much more that most histories do, like what it meant for Mobile, Alabama to become a huge factory town with a ton of migrant workers, many of whom were black and coming into the segregation South for "better work" and how that affected the idea of double victory, and what it meant for Asian-American soldiers to enlist. There is a lot of graphic imagery, not surprisingly, particularly "The Ghost Front", which details among other things US soldiers discovering concentration camps.

Summer is the best time for getting obsessed with a new (to you) book series, isn't it? I have fond memories of curling up with the first Harry Potter book when my parents got it for me for Christmas, but all the real marathons took place holed up somewhere with popsicles or iced tea.

Had I had a better library as a kid, I'm sure Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones would have been amazing for this. This summer so far I've been getting into some true crime (starting with The Bling Ring, natch). So what are/were yours? Are they worth checking out again?

Well, I forgot to upload my medialog for May, which should be a good indicator of how things are going over here! Some updates:

+ Found a short term lease for the fall, since it looks like construction is going to be ongoing for a while. On the one hand it sucks to have to really acknowledge how long it's going to be before we are able to go home, but it's also just really nice to have a bit more stability in the near future. Also, like, man. I love this friend we've been crashing with, but sometimes you just need to be able to walk around in your underwear and not worry about it. So! That's nice.

+ I had my wisdom teeth out yesterday, FINALLYYYYYYY. I was enjoying the soup and rice pudding of it all, but I'm just about ready to go back to CHEWING ON THINGS. Tragically, I think my advice was to wait for slightly longer than 24 hours. Maybe I have super healing powers, DOCTORS (no. no I do not.)

+ I HAVE been using this time to marathon hella tv, which has been pretty nice, although I think I was still a little too high yesterday to appreciate it. I did have enough sense to not attempt Sexy Popes or Hannibal, as I figured between the gauze and the nausea, those would not go super well together.

+ About two weeks ago I went on a tumblr hiatus, which has done WONDERS for my internet stress levels, but has reminded me that I miss the internet circa, like, 2007. Come back to the five and dime, journaling websites! I guess this will be my annual attempt to get back into actually maintaining this page, so let's all enjoy this rollercoaster.

I feel so behind on everything, all the time. My boss gave me the nicest possible talking-to about my forgetting to send some documents before a meeting he had, but it was still, ugh. After forgetting my debit card while getting coffee (recovered several hours later) and leaving my phone at a restaurant (recovered within the hour), I had a personal come to jesus evaluation with myself, but it still makes me feel like an alien with tunnel vision all the time.

* We went to a wedding in Chicago a few weekends ago, which was lovely, even if in attending we picked up two other weddings to attend later in the summer. That brings the total up to six.

* A combination of the fire, getting sick, getting sick again but a different way, and finally resolving my knee issues has put more of a fuck up dent in my training for the half marathon than I would have liked. I don't want to say that I don't think I'll break two hours, because I hate the feeling like I constantly set goals for myself and then make excuses for why they're unreasonable, but I just don't know.

Today in, a supposedly not at all fun experience I don’t want to repeat: having your apartment building catch fire.

I woke up around 7:15 to an explosion, followed shortly by the fire alarms going off. K and I grabbed some random stuff and went outside - my building’s alarms go off ALL THE TIME, so we weren’t really sure that it wasn’t just another fake out, until we got downstairs and saw all the smoke coming out of the building. After the fifth fire truck showed up, we decided we weren’t getting back in any time soon (and since it was about 15 degrees this morning), we walked over to a friend’s place nearby to crash for a while. I walked back over after an hour or so to check on things, but they’d sent everyone over the gym at the school across the street, where the Red Cross was checking on everyone and handing out coffee and bagels.

A few hours after THAT, coming back from lunch, I asked a fireman if people were being allowed back in and he said yeah, people were being escorted back in on a conditional basis, so I went in and went super intense anxiety bag lady on everything, like every nightmare about what I would emergency pack if I had to leave in a hurry. When I called my folks, my mom was like, “I’m so glad you’re okay. Did you take your jewelry?” JESUS. (And then, when I went back over a little while ago to talk to the building manager, I went back up to grab a couple things I’d forgotten - power chargers mostly - and did take the damn jewelry, because I promised. MOMS.)

We got so, so lucky: we’re both safe, nothing irreplaceable or even difficult to replace or clean is damaged. It’s just scary.

+ blaaaah, this week: my boss asked that I come in early tomorrow*, which is funny because I was already planning to come in early to finish a project. Double-early on a Monday, awesome stuff.

+ I think I've finally gotten through the section of my Netflix queue where I decided to get into classic movies. I'm excited for whatever the next random phase I was in, I'm guessing about 15 months ago. I'm hoping for a mid-90s renaissance period.

+ My car is slowly but surely falling apart: right now it acknowledges that it has a functioning CD player, like, 30% of the time. Most mornings it plays 20 seconds of a song and then starts skipping so aggressively that I debate pulling over and debate beating it with my shoe, which is nice, because it saves my coffee for until I actually get into the office.

+ Wow, this sounds like a bummer. I actually had a very nice week! Ran 12.5 miles (total)! Last weekend I drove up to Toronto and ate everything, please adopt me, Canadians at large. Bought some incredibly, magnificently hideous plaid shorts in order to psych myself up for spring; it's almost working.

*"I don't want to ask you to come in early, but could you come in at 8?"

+ Suddenly I feel old, part 1: how do I already have 4-5 weddings to go to this year, and as a follow-up, how am I a person who seriously schedules things months in advance, I might as well go ahead and take that wine class already.

+ My Mad Fat Diary is a beautiful, painful treasure.

+ I am going to actually change my bike seat this week! If I say it out loud then it will definitely actually happen! On account of how shame is the only factor my lizard brain acknowledges as motivation!